Welcome to the Ms. Book Club! Join authors as they delve into feminist books exploring topics ranging from the child welfare system to human rights to the intersections of race and the law.

Today, we're joined by Patricia J. Williams to discuss her recent book The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law. Beginning with a jaw-dropping rumination on a centuries-old painting featuring a white man with a Black man’s leg surgically attached (with the expired Black leg-donor in the foreground), contracts law scholar and celebrated journalist Williams uses the lens of the law to take on core questions of identity, ethics, and race.

Joining us this episode is our very special guest:

• Patricia J Williams: Patricia Williams is a professor at the Northwestern University School of Law. She is a pioneer of both the law and literature and critical race theory movements in American legal theory, as well as a widely published author and essayist.

Check out this episode’s landing page at MsMagazine.com for a full transcript, links to articles referenced in this episode, further reading and ways to take action.

Welcome to the Ms. Book Club! Join authors as they delve into feminist books exploring topics ranging from the child welfare system to human rights to the intersections of race and the law.

Today, we're joined by Khiara M. Bridges to discuss her recent book Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans. Bridges draws on two years of participant-observation to show how wealthier Black people try to leverage their class privilege to avoid some of the negative effects of their blackness—only to discover that in a country that has never reckoned with its horrific racial past, there is no escaping racism’s reach. Throughout the book, engaging, heartbreaking, infuriating stories of women’s experiences with pregnancy and prenatal care illustrate how race and racism matter regardless of wealth or status.

Joining us this episode is our very special guest:

• Khiara M. Bridges: Khiara M. Bridges is a professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. In addition to Expecting Inequity, she is the author of Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019).

Check out this episode’s landing page at MsMagazine.com for a full transcript, links to articles referenced in this episode, further reading and ways to take action.

Welcome to the Ms. Book Club! Join authors as they delve into feminist books exploring topics ranging from the child welfare system to human rights to the intersections of race and the law.

Today, we're joined by Professor Dorothy Roberts, author of The Mixed Marriage Project, A Memoir of Love, Race and Family. The Mixed Marriage Project traces Roberts' own childhood as the daughter of a white father and a Black, Jamaican immigrant mother in an era when relationships barely ever crossed the color line. It also follows the work of her anthropologist father, who spent her entire childhood working on a book about interracial marriages—a project he never finished but shaped every aspect of their family life.

Joining us this episode is our very special guest:

• Dorothy Roberts: Dorothy Roberts is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a 2024 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. An internationally acclaimed scholar, activist, and social critic, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare. Her latest book is The Mixed Marriage Project. She is also the author of TORN APART, a previous Ms. Book Club pick.

Check out this episode’s landing page at MsMagazine.com for a full transcript, links to articles referenced in this episode, further reading and ways to take action.